10 Ways to Make the Cloud Work for You

You took the time to capture all those selfies. Now if you just had the space to lovingly organize them ... iStock/Thinkstock

Digital cameras and recorders were supposed to revolutionize how we dealt with our photos and videos. Instead, we ended up with files spread across media cards, laptops, flash drives, external drives, CDs, tablets and phones.

The cloud, in the form of a photo or video management site, can rescue you from the madness. As with a file storage solution, all of your media files live on an external server. In fact, you can use most file-storage sites to back up and synchronize photos and videos, but they're not made to tag your content with useful information, or share them easily with friends and family. Purpose-built video and photo sites can do all of this and more. Most feature drag-and-drop capabilities, which make it easy to move files from a device to the cloud. Once your image or clip is online, you can add keywords, organize it into albums or galleries and then share it with a click of your mouse.

Popular photo sites include Flickr, Shutterfly and Snapfish. Serious photographers will want to check out SmugMug or Zenfolio. These feature-rich sites charge membership fees, but they give far more control to users with thousands of images and hefty space requirements.

On the video side, of course there's YouTube, which receives 72 hours of content a minute from filmographers all over the world [source: Larson]. If you fancy yourself the next Martin Scorsese, then consider Vimeo, which offers a solid feature set, including password-protected videos, yet tends to serve a smaller crowd of film enthusiasts.